A friend of the family is a locksmith and lives deep in suburbia of South Shore Montreal.
The friend recently purchased a top of the line computer system with screen, printer, etc…
Kudos to the vendor. They actually installed Vista x64 on the system so our friend had full use of the RAM installed on his system.
Problem:
With the old computer which was running windows XP, the locksmith was making keys using a program called KeyCreate and a Key cutting machine connected to a serial port.
The new system, does not have a serial port, surprise, surprise!
So our friend, being the self-sufficient sort went to Radio Shack an purchased a USB2 to Serial cable from Nexxtech. Did Radio Shack bother to mention that the cable may not work in Vista? I’ll leave that to your imagination.
OK, so the cable does not work in Vista x64. Now I am not even certain whether the issue is specifically because of Windows Vista or because the OS is installed as 64-bit.
I figured we can reload his system which will likely solve the immediate problem, or somehow hook him up with Windows XP x86 (easiest fix).
I called my colleague Jason Langone (author of www.thinkvirt.com) who happens to be a VMWare expert and we banged around some ideas. It was not long before we concluded that virtualization would be a good idea.
Now, what about the fact that most virtualization products do not support USB???
Solution:
VMWare workstation 7 supports USB virtualization. So, we tried it.
I busied myself downloading the product and getting what I need for Windows XP SP3 for the install. I configured the VM without internet access to segregate it so it will be reliable with out patches and safe from hacks and the need for patching.
Then I connected the USB-Serial cable and crossed my fingers… Success! The USB to serial bridge detected flawlessly and our locksmith friend can get busy making keys ;)
Virtualization saves the day!
